by Clinch, Jon
A Novel by Jon Clinch
Copyright 2012 by Jon Clinch
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and events are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
All rights reserved.
Version 1.1
Visit jonclinch.com to download a Reading Group Guide.
For Wendy, as always.
And for the actual Sam.
“Things happened there—love and death, mostly death.”
— Helena Citrónová
Auschwitz: A New History
Laurence Rees
“And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.”
— Job 16:1
Book One
Shadow and Light
Max
The camp at Auschwitz took one year of my life, and of my own free will I gave it another four.
This was 1942. I was fourteen years old but tall for my age, and I’d spent a lot of time outdoors, so I lied and I got away with it. My father and I passed through that barbed wire gate and presto, I was eighteen. It was his idea, and if I hadn’t followed through on it they’d have been done with me in an hour, not a year. Maybe less than that. I was just a boy, after all. I was too young to be of any use.
That little white lie makes me eighty-eight years old now. I don’t mind. My Social Security card lies and so does my driver’s license, not that I drive anymore. You don’t drive in New York unless you’re some kind of a nut.
The last time one of the art magazines came around and asked me what I thought about some young Turk—it doesn’t matter who; I don’t even remember myself—what showed up in print sounded a whole lot like you ought to forgive old Rosen, since he’ll be turning ninety in a couple of years after all. Maybe he’s going blind.
Old Max Rosen.
Sympathetic, cantankerous, worn-out old Max.
King of the old-school representationalists.
The last believer in looking at things the way they are, and reporting back.
One
The clock built high into the station wall is painted on, a clumsy and heartless trompe-l’oeil that under ordinary circumstances wouldn’t fool a soul, but those who pass beneath it have too much on their minds to look closely. If any one of them so much as glances up, some mother raising her eyes above the scuffle and the crowd for just an instant, she sees an ordinary railroad station clock and is reassured by it—reassured the same way that she is reassured by the crisply lettered signs hanging overhead and by the gaily painted flower boxes bursting with pansies beneath each station window. Reassured that all is well. That the train has stopped at an ordinary station and that she and her family have arrived at an ordinary village. That the rumors she has heard can’t possibly be true.
Those who actually check the time are men, mainly. Two or three of them per car and no more, individuals who pride themselves on leading lives of regularity and precision. Shipping agents and clerks and shopkeepers, men of commerce, each fingering his vest pocket or raising his wrist to compare this public information with his own private store. Half past three says the station clock. Half past three will have to do, for these orderly men are surprised once again to remember that they’ve bartered away their watches in recent weeks or sewn them into the linings of their overcoats or otherwise set them aside. They shake their heads—what slow learners they’ve become!—and they move on. Keeping up. The clock says half past three. There is no time to waste.
Among those who don’t look up at all are the four members of the Rosen family. The parents, Jacob and Eidel. The children, Max and Lydia. Like everyone else in their car, they’ve been under way for three days or perhaps four. Not really traveling so much as waiting to travel, locked in the cars and anticipating movement and dreading it at the same time, for with each lurch forward the train has taken them another step toward a destination known only to itself.
*
Their journey began eighteen months prior and barely a hundred miles away, high among the highest ranges of the Carpathian mountains, in the resort town of Zakopane. It was the place of Jacob’s birth, which meant that he’d be a long time seeing how very beautiful it was. He’d need help, in fact. The help of a girl, which is often the way these things go. Beauty of any sort had never been much in his line to begin with. He’d been a hiker during his youth and early manhood, but strictly for the exercise. Although his friends knew the name of every peak and the song of every bird and the chatter of every squirrel, Jacob Rosen cataloged only the most difficult routes from one destination to the next. It was never a walk in the woods for him. It was always a test.
At home he’d stand in the corner of his father’s shop, drinking the last of the water from his canteen and watching the old man’s hands as he trimmed the hair of a vacationer from Warsaw or Krakow. Listening to the stranger rhapsodize about the fields of undulating crocuses that he and his wife had discovered blooming in some alpine valley just this very morning. Thinking that this great lump of a tourist, sitting beneath a crisp white sheet as if masquerading as a mountain himself, sounded like a man who’d never seen a crocus before. Worse than that. Like the man who’d invented them.
As years went by, Jacob’s father taught him what he needed to know about running the shop, including how best to endure men like these. He said you don’t want word getting out that young Rosen has no respect for the people who constitute his trade. A reputation like that would be trouble enough right there in the town, but imagine if people began telling tales back in Warsaw. Saying, visit Zakopane if you must, but get your hair trimmed before you go! Young Rosen would just as soon take your ears off! It would be the end of everything that his father had built in this life.
More years had gone by and the old man had passed away and the shop was in Jacob’s hands when Eidel arrived, Eidel Mankowicz from Warsaw, here for a month’s skiing with her parents and her three younger sisters. She’d never seen a place even half so beautiful. She couldn’t get enough of it. The truth was that she could barely bring herself to come indoors, and late one afternoon as Jacob trimmed her father’s hair she waited outside the shop, utterly rapt and completely indifferent to what was going on inside, caught up in the gathering of clouds over the high peaks, her face illuminated by the last rays of the fading light.
Inside, Jacob slipped and nicked her father’s cheek and Mankowicz said, “Perhaps you ought to turn on a light, the evening comes so early here in the mountains.” He was a hard man by the look of him, worldly but tough-minded, a lawyer perhaps. Someone with the means to bring a large family here to the limits of the Carpathians on an extended holiday. He was a hard man but he could see that this barber wasn’t going to turn on a lamp until the last possible minute, not while pretty young Eidel was standing outside his window with her face tilted up into the dying light. Not as long as he could still see her. Mankowicz was a man who understood the world, and he resigned himself to enduring another nick or two.
What was the harm? They were children. They wouldn’t be young forever.
*
She didn’t go home to Warsaw. When the month was over she stayed on in Zakopane, and she acquired her own apartment with money from her father, and she sent home for her paints and brushes. She skied or hiked each morning and she painted each afternoon and she let Jacob court her for two years altogether, although they both knew from the beginning exactly how it was going to end. They’d both known it from the moment her father had emerged into the starlit street outside the barber shop and she had looked past him, through the open door, and let her eyes fall upon the young man within. But here in the mountains the turn of every season was a fresh delight and twenty-four months seemed a reasonable interval and after the earth had
gone twice around the sun she confessed what she’d known at the outset. That this was how she must spend the rest of her days. Here and with him. They took a train to Warsaw for the wedding, and then they hurried back to the mountains to set up housekeeping in the rooms over the shop.
Eidel claimed the attic as her studio and Jacob emptied it out and she washed the windows to let in the warm southern light. She could have spent every single one of the endless days ahead painting the changing face of Mount Rysy, registering its subtle changes without ceasing, if there had not been so many other subjects at hand. The beautiful and sturdy children of the town. The throngs of happy tourists in their holiday clothing. The steaming windows of the neighborhood cukiernia, jammed with pastries and marzipan. Her own husband.
On days that dawned particularly fine she would beg Jacob to close the shop and come with her to the mountains, and if it weren’t Monday (when the rabbi came at ten-fifteen sharp), or Thursday (when the cantor arrived at nine), he might consider it. The Sabbath was theirs either way. Eidel wasn’t religious by nature, a condition as unremarkable in Warsaw as it was scandalous in the country. Even the Catholics raised their eyebrows to see her leading her husband down the main street toward the mountains, bundled for skiing or dressed for the trail, in the light of a perfect and God-given Saturday morning.
Through her eyes he learned to see all over again, both the things she painted and the things she didn’t. Just the simple fact of her looking—whether at a larch tree or an angle of light, at a sunrise or a mossy cobblestone—made the thing that had fallen within her vision worth looking at. The gift of Eidel’s attention to the world became his gift as well.
By and by the children arrived, Max entirely by accident and Lydia because Max had brought the two of them more happiness than they could possibly keep to themselves. By that reckoning, they realized only afterward, there might have been no end of it.
Max was like his father. Intense, constantly in motion, tearing through the world but in certain ways oblivious to it. Jacob himself, older now and wiser, prayed that some day, when Max was sufficiently mature to handle the shock, he would find someone like Eidel to change everything for him—someone to open his eyes and slow him down—although in his heart he doubted that it was possible. Lightning might strike twice, but not love. Not that kind.
As for Lydia, she was like neither of them. She was unworldly, ethereal. She talked late and she walked late and she was in no hurry for anything whatsoever, content to let the world come to her if it should come at all. About the time she was ready to start school, the synagogue got her attention. It was the other children, really, the line of them filing toward shul each morning, filtering one by one and two by two from the doorways of houses and cottages. They joined with one another and flowed down the streets like water, as if they had no will of their own and didn’t require any. Her mother had never cared for the synagogue and her father had quit attending altogether, except on the holiest of holy days when he crept in later than the last of the shuffling old men and felt even more guilt than was necessary. But Lydia drew them back. She reminded her father of where he had come from, and she opened her mother’s eyes to the invisible.
Men and women sat apart in the synagogue, the women in a balcony and the men below. The separation was meant to focus attention on the everlasting, but for Eidel it had the opposite effect. The absence of her husband and son was a powerful distraction. It set her on edge and kept her mind from settling. She was certain that if only she were able to sit alongside them she would be able to pray, although she couldn’t decide if this was a failing on her part or a failing on the part of the synagogue or something else. In any event it was vexing in the extreme. She found herself trying to single out their voices during the prayers, Max’s high and Jacob’s low, entwining around the rote mutterings of the old men and enclosing them. This, the faithful and patient act of listening for her son and her husband, became of necessity her one and only prayer. It was enough.
At least she had Lydia by her side. Lydia whose idea this had been in the first place.
Early in the morning they would climb the thirty-six steps to the balcony with their coats still on and take their seats with the last of the snow still melting from the soles of their shoes, and from that chill and elevated place—an aerie itself—they would look out over the town through a high window and be the first to see the sun rising over the mountains. The men murmured below in the dark, and the Catholics were still asleep in their beds, and for just that one moment, the day was their secret.
*
The children grew, and Eidel painted them at every age. As a rule her paintings of Max captured him either in motion or in recovery. Playing some game or setting off along a mountain path or resting afterward. In the summertime she would catch him at the kitchen table with a glass of cold milk and the alpine breeze lifting the lace curtain, in the wintertime before the fire with a mug of tea, his cheeks ruddy, bending forward to massage the life back into his toes. She had to work fast when she painted her son, and she had to see him clearly and completely in the space of an instant, for soon he would be just a blur.
To paint her daughter, on the other hand, she had to learn patience. She needed to be watchful, for she might find Lydia anywhere, pensive or wide-eyed, with a book or a toy or just an open window, dreaming. But the trick was to capture her stillness, the moment of the painting and the moment before it and the moment after it all come together into one. Alone with Lydia for the hours it took, she sometimes felt as if she were entering into the child’s dream herself. That was when the work went well. When the effort fell away and all that remained was love.
One such painting was her favorite. It showed the attic studio, shot through with light. In the window was Lydia, seated at a wooden table in profile, hands folded, the sun gleaming upon her auburn hair and burnishing it into surprising gold. Upon her small rapt face was a pink glow of anticipation for what might lie beyond the window. For what might lie ahead in the world. And behind her in a shadowy corner, barely visible but rendered with the same intensity of observation and care as all the rest, lay a castoff toy, a stuffed gray rabbit worn down to almost nothing, left there only the week prior but left perhaps for good.
The more she painted the children the less she painted her husband, not only because there were only so many hours in the day but because Jacob was usually busy in the shop downstairs. Thinking of the future, building up his trade, setting aside such treasure as he could for the days when the children would need it most. A university education. A wedding.
“But papa already has a fortune,” Eidel would say, which only made him work harder. Max and Lydia were his children, not his father-in-law’s, and their future required a fortune of his own making.
He hung a clock over the big plate-glass mirror and he put a sign in the window promising to cut any man’s hair in five minutes and shave his face in five minutes more—a banker on a schedule or a busy shopkeeper with customers waiting could be spruced up and on his way in no time at all—and as the children grew his trade grew as well. No longer just the rabbi at ten-fifteen on Monday and the cantor on Thursday at nine, but the mayor and the chief of police and for a while even the monsignor from the Church of the Holy Family on Krupowki Street. On some days there was a line.
The line began dwindling with the Occupation. It didn’t take long to peter out altogether, although during the first weeks Zakopane seemed almost immune, remote as it was from the great centers of population, the cities like Warsaw and Krakow where Jews lived in higher concentrations and made easier targets. But the glories of the Carpathian peaks appealed to the Nazis as irresistibly as to anyone else, and soon enough there were security police in the streets. Sicherheitspolizei, along with uniformed SS officers and grim-looking Hungarians and Slovaks and Ukrainians very different from those who typically visited this mountain town on holiday. These serious visitors were all men, for one thing, pale men with dark looks. Even their smiles l
ooked hungry.
Rather than draw attention to himself, Jacob removed the sign from his window. The fortune he’d been laying up began to diminish.
The SS commandeered the Palace Hotel, the grandest building in town, a place known for luxury and opulence, although no one dared imagine now what kind of pleasures the new management might be indulging there. Now and then a Jewish family would receive word that they were to appear at headquarters for questioning, and sometimes they returned to the village untouched or apparently so and sometimes they did not, but under no circumstances did any of them ever speak a word of what had transpired. In the end they all vanished one way or another, either immediately into the bowels of the hotel or afterward into the mists of the mountains like mist themselves. Before long Jacob decided that taking down his sign wasn’t enough in the way of self-defense.
And so, toward the end of 1939, they abandoned Zakopane for good. With their clothing packed in steamer trunks and Eidel’s paintings boxed up in square wooden crates and Jacob’s barbering tools tucked into a modest little folding leather case, they boarded a train and returned to Eidel’s childhood home in Warsaw. Leaving, like any family at the close of their time in the mountains, with mingled sadness and anticipation.
*
Warsaw granted them fourteen months. Eidel’s father had connections in the courts, and they served him just that long but no longer. So much for the illusion of immunity. So much for having faith that conditions would improve, that the occupation would end or that they would be somehow passed over. So much for going from the fire into the frying pan. Her father and mother packed a pair of small bags and set out for Sweden, begging Eidel and her family to come along as well, but what can you do with children, even grown ones? They have minds of their own. Jacob and Eidel took Max and Lydia and went to Krakow, on their second involuntary rail journey of the war years and the first of many that would serve to whittle them and their possessions down into kindling.
